THIS PAST SUNDAY, “Super Bowl Sunday,” I preached on the theme of “winning and losing” based on Philippians 2:1-11. Using The Big Game as a metaphor, I addressed how it has become America‘s biggest religious holiday and how in a few hours time, we would finally learn who this year‘s NFL champion would be- the best of the best and greatest team of them all. There would be no tie as it would end with a clear winner and a definite loser. Since its inception a half century ago, I have seen every Super Bowl, and although I can probably tell you who won in most years, I've long forgotten who the losers were. The fact is we live in a world which rewards its winners but damns its losers.

If there is one unpardonable sin in our culture, it would have to be failure. The avoidance of failure is programmed into us beginning with our earliest years. What is so difficult about failure is that it is so hard for us to accept. Despite the fact that everyone fails at something and that it is an essential part of life itself, we can give it such prominence in our lives that we allow it to determine how we see ourselves and define who we are. It can lead to devastating moods and scar one's character; it can rob us of our self-respect and produce unrelenting guilt. An inability to accept failure in our lives can eventually destroy all meaningful relationships and even lead to suicide. The famed Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal once said, "Americans worship success" and he was right. The craving for success has even penetrated the culture of the church. It seems the most popular preachers are not the ones who preach sacrifice and servitude and help for the poor and needy, but those who promote a “prosperity gospel,” a gospel which promises wealth and success right on through this world and into the next, the same kind of message the rich young ruler came to Jesus hoping to hear. There‘s very little cross in this theology; it remains a gospel for "winners," a message many Christians still can't get enough of.

Our text from Philippians provides us, however, with an alternative way of living. It is Paul‘s model or paradigm of Christian citizenship; it is a blueprint for the Christian‘s life. If the church is to have any kind of witness in the world, then it will have to conduct itself in a way that is significantly different from how the rest of the world lives and operates. When Paul wrote these words, he was addressing a church and a culture that wasn‘t altogether different from the one we currently live in. There was great dissension within it as the Christians there were tempted to be unloving, divisive, selfish, arrogant, and overly concerned about their own rights at the expense of others. A competitive spirit had crept in among its members along with a desire for personal prestige- the need to be desperately admired and respected by others. Such attitudes kept them from faithfully manifesting the presence of Christ‘s life among themselves and to others. Paul tells them:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and become obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

What Paul gives us here is the clearest model of how each and every Christian is called to live- as a slave or servant to both God and to one another in humble service even as Christ himself did. In our text, the great Apostle pleads with the Philippians to lay aside all their pettiness and their divisions, their pride and personal ambitions, and to assume the same kind of humility and selflessness that Jesus exemplified in his own life. The great characteristics of his life were humility, obedience, and self-renunciation. Jesus came not to assert his dominance over humanity but to serve it; he came not to perform his own will but rather the will of his Father in heaven; and he did not come to exalt himself but to renounce his glory and become one with us in the interests of reconciling us back to God. If these were the essential hallmarks of Christ and his ministry, then they can no less be the hallmarks of our own lives as well. Selfishness, self-seeking, and self-display will only destroy our likeness to Christ and our fellowship with one another.

Jesus knew rejection from the very beginning, when there was no room for him at the inn. When he preached his first sermon at his home synagogue, before his own church family, they became so enraged that they tried to throw him over a cliff. His mother and brothers and sisters were convinced he had lost his mind and did everything they could to talk him out of it. After three and a half years of close companionship, his disciples still couldn‘t comprehend what kind of king he was. They couldn‘t understand that instead of a crown of gold, a crown of thorns would cover his head and brow. When they came to arrest him, one of his own betrayed him, another denied him three times, and all but one fled for fear of their lives. The religious and political establishment tried to silence him by having him taken out and then crucifying him. While suspended from those nails, his last personal possession--his cloak--was taken from him and gambled for by the soldiers. And then came the ultimate indignity- that as he became the object of sin and loathing on that cross, even his Heavenly Father was forced to forsake him as well. No, the case can be made that rather than the greatest success, Jesus became the greatest loser who ever lived and his cross, the greatest symbol of failure ever devised.

And yet, where the secular world can only see rejection and failure in his life, when viewed through the prism of faith, it all takes on a completely different picture for us. By refusing all avenues of power to save himself and choosing instead the path of love and humility and gentleness and peace, he was able to win our hearts and earn our trust from a position of weakness and vulnerability rather than through force or fear. And because he has experienced failure in HIS life, we know he can then identify with us, with our own failures and defeats and disappointments, and what‘s more, that he‘ll be there with us to support us when we do fail again, which of course we inevitably will. And so the paradox of our faith is that the way to real success in this world lies in becoming the greatest failure, even as he was, that is, by not thinking of ourselves greater than we actually are, by seeing ourselves as servants to him and one another even as he was to us, and by extending our hand to those around us that we might help them up instead of keeping them down. If we are willing to risk being a failure even as he was, we just may discover that that is the only success that truly counts.